Washington and Wall Street to Puerto Ricans: Drop Dead!

August 5, 2015 - 10:00am  lindorff

Puerto Rico's the new Greece, DC's the new Berlin, the bankers are the same gangsters

by:

Dave Lindorff

You can read the entire article in the New York Times Tuesday business section reporting on Puerto Rico’s default on a payment on its staggering $72 billion debt without once learning that the little Caribbean island, home to 3.5 million US citizens, is a territory of the United States, or more properly, a colony, insofar as its residents have no representation in Washington, cannot vote for national candidates for office, and furthermore, are subject to US federal courts, whose judges are all appointed by the federal government.

At least USA Today made the story its page one lead, instead of just a business story, but it too just notes that the island is a “commonwealth” and that as such it cannot be bailed out as Greece hopes to be, by such international bodies as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the European Union. The meaning of the term “commonwealth” is not defined.

The Wall Street Journal ran its report on the bankruptcy on the front of its Money & Investing section, making it clear that the only significance of this story was to the many institutional and individual investors who hold Puerto Rican tax-free bonds in the municipal bond allocation of their investment portfolios. It too failed to explain what it meant to call Puerto Rico a “commonwealth.”

US citizens outside of Puerto Rico, most of whom don’t even know Puerto Ricans are fellow citizens, and not potential “illegal immigrants” to their shores like the Haitians, Dominicans, Cubans and other residents of neighboring islands, are no doubt understandably confused about Puerto Rico’s status, given that Kentucky, Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania all refer to themselves as “commonwealths” and not as states.

But Puerto Rico is no “commonwealth,” a term which the Oxford dictionary defines as “an independent state or community, especially a democratic republic,” and which Websters dictionary defines as a nation or state or alternatively -- in a special category for Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, presented without any sense of irony -- as “a political unit having local autonomy but voluntarily united with the United States.”

I'm not sure how that last definition got past the editors, though. Puerto Rico is can never, with a straight face, be said to have been “voluntarily united” with the United States. The island was a spoil of war when the US defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, and it instantly became a colony under brutal military rule, its indigenous independence movement crushed, and even its native Spanish language barred from public education from 1898 until 1948.

When Puerto Rico’s purely symbolic but powerless elected delegates assembly voted in 1914 to call unanimously for the island’s independence, the US Congress responded in 1917 with the Jones Act, which declared all residents of Puerto Rico to be US citizens, whether they liked it or not (people were given a one-time chance within the next 30 days to renounce that citizenship forever, but nobody since then has had that right).

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